


The Hydromant

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette, The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Genre: Crossover, Epistolary, Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, Magic, Magical Worldbuilding, POV First Person, Thou/Thee Pronouns, much more DoL than TGE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:01:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21599608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: Vida brought magic with her from the Imari, and brought magic home to it too. Not all of the latter was Cabaline.
Relationships: Vida Eoline & Shaleän Sevraseched
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	The Hydromant

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit of an AU, at least from the standpoint of magical worldbuilding. In DoL canon, Vida is an extremely minor character in a very large cast, and we don’t know anything about her specific powers except that she helped defend the Mirador in the wake of the Virtù’s destruction. If she’d actually been a hydromant, I imagine that Felix, Gideon, and Mavortian would have invited her into the depths of the Mirador to help Felix mend the Virtù. But since Gideon was “reading a treatise on water magic from Imar Eiren,” and Vida is Imaran, I decided to give her water magic.
> 
>  **ETA:** Thanks to [farevenasdecidedtouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse) for catching the error of me calling Maia Shaleän’s “brother” when he’s actually her nephew. That's what I get for posting tired...

To mine esteemed Shaleän, greetings!

It irks me that I must write thee this letter, instead of sitting with thee at Manti’s inn by the shore and telling thee what I’ve been up to over a stoup of punch, in between alternating toasts to Jashuki and Ashevezhko. Sadly, art at sea with thy wife, heading not south to the Imari but north to the Elflands for their Summernight festivities. So I’ll be handing this note off to the other packet captain out of the Versheleens, whose name refuses to surface in my brain just now. Ah, the vagaries of advancing age.

That said, I’m glad that thou and thy sisters have grown so close to your nephew, and that your father got to spend time with him before he went to your Ulis. News of the Ethuveraz is rather irregular down here — when _will_ the damned Elders decide to build us a mooring post for airships? — but from the bits and pieces I’ve heard, he sounds like an outstanding young man with an equally commendable empress. Pity it took the deaths of his father and brothers to bring about the reunion on the other side of the family, though in the case of his father it certainly wasn’t much of a loss.

And at least I’m writing thee in Imaran. Gods, I don’t miss speaking or writing in Marathine at all. Did I ever tell thee it doesn’t distinguish between “you” and “thou”? It’s all “you,” which is Nivôse-cold when speaking to a dear friend or a lover. It fits the Mirador well, of course. I’ll not say I didn’t play the game and play it well in Mélusine, but I certainly don’t miss checking my back regularly for knives. That place ruins everything, even friendships, to say nothing of love matches. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have gone to Cetho instead when I was young, despite it being backwards in so many ways that thy nephew is only beginning to correct. Not to mention the Athmaz’are’s absolutely tragic stance on fashion.

Sadly I haven’t much gossip for thee at the moment. The rainy season always tends to be dull, with people keeping to their homes, and it’s too early in it yet for people to start getting on one another’s nerves and coming to blows. Manti’s newest daughter-in-law bore twin grandsons a few months ago, and since then this one-town island has spoken of nothing else. Glad as I am for all of them, I can’t say that I have ever found babies to be an enthralling topic of conversation.

So let me bore _thee_ to tears for a while instead by babbling about mine experiments. I’ve told thee before that I was a member of the Curia, the ruling body of the Cabaline school of magic. Perhaps hast heard of the Virtù, the subject of various charming paintings, reproductions of which may have made their way into the hold of thy ship? It’s an enormous glass-like sphere in the Mirador that collects power from individual wizards and channels it into wards and spells. This magic defends the Marathat Protectorate against the powers of the Bastion, the Kekropian Empire’s hive of soldier-wizards, and also against those of the Coeurterre in the Tibernian Empire. Some years ago, a powerful blood wizard in league with the Bastion shattered the Virtù, and the Curia was forced to rely on the separate magical resources of its members to shore up the Protectorate’s defenses. As I had come to the Mirador already trained in practical water magics, they charged me with drawing protection from the Sim.

Now, the Sim is a cold, black river that stinks of hot metal and that runs through the empire northeast to southwest, like a sword through a soldier’s body. In Mélusine it mostly runs underground. The Coeurterre theorizes that magic runs along channels they call leys, and the flow is either “clairant” or “noirant,” meaning light or dark. Not to say good or evil — it’s just a polarity, like day and night, summer and winter, birth and death. Wizards are more naturally suited for work with one kind or the other. Water magic in the Imari is mostly clairant, thanks to the strength of the sun here, but the flow of the Sim is noirant, particularly under the earth.

And the Mirador is a labyrinth with the Sim as its heart, lending it its power. Labyrinths have their own magic, but that falls under another speciality entirely, architectural thaumaturgy, the exceedingly arcane details of which I won’t inflict upon thee. It’s not my domain in any case; it’s mainly that of very bright wizards who make for very dull company, and the one best known for his work on labyrinths drove himself mad with theory. Suffice it to say I was charged with using my powers in a way that ran contrary to my natural inclinations and to my childhood training as well. It took a while to get accustomed to it, but my gifts are strong enough that I adapted.

And then the Virtù was mended, and things went back to normal, or what passes in the Mirador for “normal.” And thus the years went by, until I finally realized that the agonizing prospect of having my tattoos effaced — tattoos I’d earned in just as much blood and pain — was far more appealing than spending the rest of my life in the Mirador. I did some calculations and found I’d enough resources to fund an early retirement back in the Imari. I realized I’d need something to keep myself busy, too. And it occurred to me that the magic I’d worked on the Sim might have pertinence at home. As little hope as I have of warding slavers away from the Islands entirely, I can at least lay down a foundation on which later hydromants can build.

Of course, I had to yield up my rings as well as mine ink. But the Curia did let me take one book back with me: an Eireni treatise on water magic. It had last been in the possession of a defector from the Bastion, a very sweet wizard who was tortured, maimed, and some years later assassinated for his betrayal. His lover, a wizard whose brilliance was matched only by his insufferability, violated the Cabaline oath to avenge him upon the assassin and was exiled for it; and the book went to one of the Mirador’s many archives. I knew most of the treatise well enough already, as well as thou know’st the stars, but it never hurts to have a compass to hand. And then I set off for home, during which journey I was most fortunate to make thine acquaintance.

To bring thee current, no wordplay intended, with my doings: I think I did mention the last time I saw thee that I’d been working magic on lagoons. Streams and ocean waves are clairant; the depths of the ocean that the sunlight can’t penetrate are more obviously noirant, but deep-sea magic is its own entity, far beyond what most schools of magic are capable of teaching. Lagoons, however, balance the polarity quite nicely if they’re not stagnant, making them a good entry point for a wizard seeking to harness energy from a body of water. Weeks into months of experiments have finally begun to bear fruit: I am able to perturb the waters of a lagoon if I begin with its noirant ley. With some practice I have learned how to pick up the clairant flow as well and plait the two together, and once that is achieved it’s a very simple matter to overturn the entire body of water. While I can’t hope to do this to the entire ocean, of course, I believe that with further practice I may be able to capsize slaver ships on the waves, even on a perfectly calm day.

I should add that I have not only the Mirador, or at least the Cabal, to thank for my newfound talents. I also owe a debt to that brilliant but insufferable wizard who was exiled from the Protectorate. He had been unwillingly and unwittingly employed by the blood wizard in the destruction of the Virtù, and he also discovered how to mend it on his own. Though often allies, we were never friends: he was, in nearly all ways, a terrible person. But he was singularly resourceful, and I sense that both qualities were forged in the horrific crucible of his tender years. He trod many highly unorthodox paths, took ideas from them all like a thaumaturgical magpie, and brought that learning to bear on behalf of a magical polity with a broad understanding of “heresy” and a zeal for stamping it out.

When he was in his cups one night he told me that there are some magics one cannot control and defeat; one must, instead, open oneself to them, become conduits for them, as leys channel magic. While this is not heresy, strictly speaking, neither is it a theory that would put one in good odor in the Mirador; and this fellow was very rarely in good odor there to begin with. Unsurprisingly, he quite denied he’d ever said anything of the kind when we were next alone together and he was sober. I will never be sure if he simply didn’t recall his words, or he was lying.

I recalled them, of course, after his expulsion, and on board thy ship reading the treatise in my bunk, and while standing by the shore of my first lagoon making my first ineffectual ripples. Years of continual verbal thrust-and-parry, close friendships and love affairs rent asunder by internecine politics, do not precisely encourage one’s ability to be _open_. But I was home on Imar Eiren, barefoot in the crowngrass, wearing my mother’s old striped shift instead of pearl-buttoned gowns and stays, no silver and amethyst on my fingers, scars on mine arms instead of tattoos, no one else around me in the sweltering afternoon. And I closed mine eyes, and I _opened_ myself… and I could feel the magic flow through me, first noirant, then clairant, then the two entwined together like lovers. Shaleän, it was like I was a little girl again, making water flow through a cane from one jug to another, and Oro hauling me up onto his big shoulders and parading me around town and shouting to everyone that he’d made a water-witch out of me after all, and my mother and sister crying and endless toasts over punch and more blessings than I’d ever heard before in my life.

I know dostn’t get nearly enough time to spend with thy nephew and his bride and their little princesses and prince, but I do hope wilt be setting sail again before it turns too cold for a safe return across the Chadevan Sea and points south. When art next on Imar Eiren, I’ll churn a lagoon for thee and thy crew, perhaps one with a healthy supply of fish. I’ll set out a net beforehand, and then we can roast them and some sweet tubers over a coalpit before we all get too drunk on punch to be trusted to light a fire.

With thee in my thoughts,  
thy dear friend,  
Vida


End file.
